Chromebooks Making The Grade, Over 1 Million Shipped To Schools In Second Quarter

Give Google credit for sticking with its Chromebook platform despite a somewhat slow start and initial lukewarm reception. Over time, consumers are starting to see the value in these cloud-oriented systems, and they're proving particularly popular in schools. According to Google, schools bought more than 1 million Chromebook systems in the second quarter of 2014.

David Andrade, CIO for the Bridgeport Public Schools district, explained in a guest blog post on Google's Enterprise portal that the low cost of ownership and easy maintenance clinched the decision to stock up on Chromebook systems.

"We could buy three Chromebooks for the price of a single desktop computer and the district’s small IT team wouldn’t have to struggle to keep up with the repairs and updates on aging PCs," Andrade explains. "We would also save on support time and costs since Chromebooks update automatically. Initially, we bought 4,000 Chromebooks for our high schools, where every classroom now has a Chromebook for each student. At the same time, we decided to start using Google Apps for Education so every student would have an email address, something we’d never been able to do before. We also used Google Drive to move student documents off of our internal file storage system – another way to save the IT team time and money. So they can now work together and communicate with teachers even while not in the classroom."

Andrade said that after receiving some hard earned grant money, he bought more Chromebooks, which now number 9,000 district-wide. And his is but a single example of school's seeing the economic value in these cloud-based machines versus spending more on a Windows or Mac.

Will the same be true outside of schools? It's unlikely, especially since Windows-based systems are coming down in price. That said, it's interesting that Chromebook models comprise three of the top five best selling laptops on Amazon.